


The Haunting of Boothroyd

by Evenlodes_Friend



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-20
Updated: 2013-02-20
Packaged: 2017-11-29 23:02:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/692552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evenlodes_Friend/pseuds/Evenlodes_Friend
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Q comes home on Christmas Eve, expecting two days off.  He's going to sleep.  But there is a 'ghost' on his flat with other ideas.  Prompted by the beginning of 'A Christmas Carol'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Haunting of Boothroyd

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in a haze of influenza at Christmas when I had sat through no less than four versions of 'A Christmas Carol' on the TV because I couldn't get up from the sofa. I kept thinking about Bond being like Marley's ghost, with all his baggage and chains. I think there may be a bit more to this, but it hasn't come out yet...

         It was well past ten on Christmas Eve.  Q had spent the evening wrestling with a particularly fiendish encryption algorithm on a laptop taken during a raid on the home of a terrorist suspect.  (Once he had broken it, plans for atrocities broke out all over the screen, more than enough incriminating data to send the man to prison for several centuries.)  Now he had two days off.  Well, two days on call.  He was pretty sure they would have him in the office at some point in the next 48 hours, but in the meantime, he planned to sleep for as long as was humanly possible.

            He shuffled up the steps to the front door of his apartment building, fumbling the keys.  It was an ugly foyer with plate glass windows onto the street, more like an office building than a place where people made their homes.  To be honest, Q didn’t really make his home there either.  It was just a set of rooms where he occasionally flopped down to sleep in between shifts in Q branch.

            Raising his hand, the key about to slip into the Yale lock, he noticed the etched image on the glass by the door, the face of a stylised lion.  It was not something he had ever thought about before, but it looked strangely like Bond.  That broad flat face, grizzled cheeks, long, straight nose and heavy lower lip.  Blonde too, in his imagination at least, although the image itself was milky white. 

Bond was on his mind.  Q had talked him through a mission only yesterday, but then he had gone AWOL, as he so often did.  He should have been back from Paris by now, safely ensconced in the debriefing suites, but he had, as Eve Moneypenny so succinctly put it, ‘done a bunk’.  No one was surprised.  It had become his habit since the death of the last M.  Bond was becoming erratic, more unpredictable with every mission.  His emotional baggage was weighing him down.  Sooner or later, the new M was going to have to put a stop to it.  And Q didn’t like to think about what would happen then.

Inside the foyer, he checked his post, a clutch of bank letters and credit card offers addressed to Geoffrey Boothroyd, the name under which he had lived since he took on the helm of Q Branch.  It was what you did.  Every major position had a name, a nom de plume that came with it, though in the business they called it a ‘legend’.  When you took the job, you took the name, the history, the house, the personality.  Q wondered for a moment, looking up from the envelope of a Barclaycard statement, who Bond had been before he became Bond, or more precisely, _what_ he had been.  Because he was sure that it was the dissonance between the legend and the real man inside that was causing the cracks in 007’s famous carapace.

He stood in the lift, watching the lights behind the buttons illuminate and darken as it rose.  He was bone weary.  He wanted his bed.  He lent back against the wall, closed his eyes, and almost immediately a loud ping made him jump and the doors opened.  His floor.

Christmas, he thought, fumbling for the key to the flat.  Maybe his Christmas present to himself should be a new coat, since this one swamped him so badly that his fingers barely peeped out from the cuffs, making manipulating the key into the lock a ridiculously frustrating effort.

As soon as the door closed behind him, he knew he was not alone.

Not something wrong entirely, so much as something not quite right.

He peered through the doorway to the living area, into the inky shadows.  On the other side of the huge windows, London twinkled in the icy night.  He put his keys down on the hall table and slipped softly into the main room on feet of velvet night.

‘Sanctuary,’ a voice whispered.

There was a shape, a man, sitting on the sofa, back to the night sky, the faintest silhouette picked out against the city lights.

Q knew the voice immediately.  He reached out and switched on a side light.

Bond was a mess.  Slumped on the sofa, his face was marred with smears of blood and oil and bruises, his lip cut, his sandy hair sticking up.  There was blood on his sleeve, trails of sticky darkness between his fingers.

‘Lucky the leather won’t stain,’ Q said, eyeing the upholstery.  ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Sanctuary?’

‘That’s what the debrief suite is for,’ Q told him.

Bond raised a sarcastic eyebrow.

‘You know I could get fired for having you here?’  Q pointed out.

‘They wouldn’t fire you, Q,’ Bond purred.  ‘They know how much damage you can do in your pyjamas.’

‘I should throw you out.’

‘A little solidarity with a fellow agent?  Just for the night?’

Q huffed and pulled off his jacket.  ‘M told me you used to do this to her, too,’ he said.

‘She had a spare room.  You just have a sofa.  I’m definitely going down in the world.’

‘I’m sorry my premises are insufficiently spacious,’ Q said.  ‘Perhaps you should just book into the Dorchester and have done with it.’

‘They threw me out of the Dorchester for bleeding on the upholstery.’

‘I’m not in the least surprised.’  Q helped Bond up and guided him over to the kitchen area.  There were high stools around the island unit that separated the cooking area from the seating area, and he settled Bond onto one before switching on the lights.  007 blinked uncomfortably in the drenching glare.  Q ran a bowl of water and then groped under the sink for his medical kit.

‘Take off your shirt.’

‘What, no foreplay?’

‘Just get on with it, 007.’

‘It’s just a graze,’ Bond said, but he did as he was told nevertheless.  Probably for the first time in a very long while, Q thought as he rummaged in the medical bag for his supplies.  When he looked up, Bond’s impressively muscular physique was inches away, sixpack twitching, bronzed skin with a sheen of sweat on it – in more pain than he is letting on, then.  There were nasty bruises.  And the ugly gash at the top of the arm, at the fleshiest part.  Q fetched the water and swabbed the wound.

‘That needs stitching.’

‘I know,’ Bond said.  ‘Right arm, though.  I’m right handed.  Its awkward to see.’

Q cleaned off the surrounding area and mopped it with antiseptic.  ‘I presume that is Bond for “will you stitch it for me, Q?”?’

Bond just flashed him a wry smile.

Q got out his suture kit, and sprayed the site with a local anaesthetic.

‘It’s a long time since I’ve done this,’ he said, threading the needle, and going slightly cross-eyed with the effort.  ‘The result won’t be pretty.’

‘I don’t need pretty.  I need _not_ bleeding.’

This really was extremely inconvenient.  He was going to have to get close to Bond, inches away in fact.  He would have to touch Bond’s skin.  It would be awkward.  Q did not do this kind of thing.  Body contact of any sort was not his field.  Computers, yes.  Technology, engineering, anything of that nature, yes, no problem.  But muscular skin with a sheen of perspiration, skin that covered a man with a very particular sort of reputation to maintain?  No.  That was well outside Q’s comfort zone.

Which was probably why Bond was here.

Bond did like to torment him, after all.  Q was not under any illusions.  However far 007 might trust him, however much he might even be fond of him, as far as a man like Bond, a man in Bond’s position, could be fond of anyone, it was his habit and his addiction to use his body to get what he wanted.  For a moment the memory of their first meeting flashed through Q’s mind, the frisson of electricity that had passed between them in the National Gallery that first afternoon, Bond in his heavy woollen coat, looking worn and weary, Q feeling puckish in his oversized parka until Bond’s palm had touched his.  When he got back to the office afterwards, Eve had laughed at him.

‘You too?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Come off it, darling!  We all get that look in our eyes when we’ve met him!’

Q was determined not to become another one of Bond’s ‘Girls’.

He leaned in and inserted the needle.

Bond grimaced.

On the second insertion, he actually flinched.

‘Careful!’

‘Stop whining!  If you want it done better, the nurses at HQ are very good.’

Another stitch, twiddling the forceps around the curve of the needle, tying off the thread.

‘What are you doing there, blanket stitch?’ Bond grumbled.

‘If you aren’t careful, I’ll start doing daisy chains.’

‘I’d prefer couching,’ Bond said, and gave him a provocative grin.

Q leaned in and frowned as he worked the next knot, trying to concentrate and not think about the rich scent of the man under his trembling hands.

‘Your knowledge of embroidery is unexpectedly impressive,’ he muttered.

‘I’m a man of many talents,’ Bond smirked.

‘Which I assume include hacking into my personnel records and reading up on my background?’

‘You’re not the only one who’s good with a laptop.’

Q made another insertion, causing Bond to hiss.  ‘Such a fuss!’

There was a pause while he worked, and Bond watched him, their faces so close that Q could feel 007’s whisky-smelling breath on his cheek.

‘My mother was a member of the Royal Guild of Embroiderers,’ Q told him.  ‘She taught us all to sew and embroider before our tenth birthdays, boys and girls.’  He said it only to break the tension he felt building in the silence between them.

‘And I’m very grateful to her,’ Bond said.  ‘I can knit.’

Q stood up and frowned at him.  ‘Pardon?’

‘You’ll  remember I was Commander in the Royal Navy before I became an MI6 agent?  Well, all sailors learn to knit.’

Q stared at him for several moments, trying to divine whether he was just teasing or not.  Bond, after all, made a living by living a counterfeit life.  But there was nothing in his face, no tell to suggest that there was anything other than truth in his words.

‘How very domestic of you.  Do you do baby layettes?’

‘Mostly heavy sweaters,’ Bond said.  ‘Not much call for baby layettes around me.’

And then he lunged forward and claimed Q’s lips.

 


End file.
